Math @ Tagged

Writing software isn’t just about stringing keywords and variables together.  Software has behavior and analyzing that behavior is crucial in a high-volume environment where a new feature has to support 100s of thousands of requests per second across a distributed tier of servers.  That’s where math comes in.  Math@Tagged is about thinking about how things scale or don’t scale, about how software handles failure, about how to optimize algorithms, and how to use the calculus, linear algebra, and probability and statistics background that most engineers have to answer those questions.

Some examples:

• When building a newsfeed, is it better to push or pull data?
• What fraction of a connection pool is actually used?
• Is it better to minimize mean time to failure or mean time to recovery?
• What is entropy, and what does it mean in the context of user passwords?

Math@Tagged is a weekly series that addresses these problems as they apply to Tagged.  Talks are about 45min long and are meant to both teach and encourage discussion.  We prefer material that has been applied (successfully) at Tagged.

Itai Zukerman is a Senior Software Designer at Tagged and leads our Math@Tagged sessions.